11.16.04

Letter from Santa Clara

The A-, B-, & C-Vitamin Societies

By Bill Costley

Back in the late '60s, I used to ask myself whether I wanted to live in:

(A) a just society, or,

(B) just one where my activity would really make a difference.

{flashback:} During WW2, I was born into a working-class, unionist Democratic household in a single-company-dominated factory-city. My refusal to go to Vietnam (stated early, even before it was official, on my birthday in 1960, the day I registered at the local draft board in a building where my uncle was the navy recruiter) seriously eroded my relationship with the political arrangement of my birth. Yes, I was politically connected; my antiwar stance shattered that, eventually ejecting me from what I had naively imagined was an A-society into a B-one.

You know what the Vietnam Era was like. I spent it as a member of a tiny political minority, even in Massachusetts, where I was born and raised. That a spectacular popular front floated me to the crest of its wave came as quite a surprise to me. Because the Vietnam war was perceived as an unmitigated disaster, after 1975 I dared to return to my home city to co-found a radical-arts core-group of a poet, painter, and playwright (me). We soon succeeded beyond my wildest imaginings! We're now brought back each year to perform at the local state community college — which didn't even exist during my youth there. We're considered the living continuation of my home city's long radical tradition, still embodied in a living radical poet my father knew growing up there.

Nonetheless, upon Ronald Reagan's re-election, I left the usa (for Scotland) where I lived out that B-society scenario in the country my father had emigrated from as a child, & then came back to once again live out the B-society scenario here. Still the B-society, I thought. Still the struggle.

Now, at 62, having just moved to northern California, the appeal of the A-society is coming back to me. Just where is that Just Society? I still ask myself, still willing to live in it. Am I in it in the contemporary California Republic, or is this just the temporary State of California, in a transitional C-society? It is just Vitamin-C rich?